Paradise Red (18 page)

He turns his body slightly, as though politely waiting to join the end of the line, and only when the last flick of black has vanished does he press on through another door, and another, before he knows that the next room must contain the Flame.

He does not enter immediately. Instead he sinks into the shadows. His plan is quite simple. He will wait and slip in with another perfectus, sitting quietly until he sees how things are. There must be no hurry and when he strikes there must be no mercy. When he has disposed of anybody in his way, he must hide the Flame in the arms of the tunic and then mingle again with the other perfecti and hope he can get out before their loss is noticed. Even if the loss is noticed quickly, with all the perfecti dressed the same and so many not really known to one another, it will take them a little while to single him out, and anything may have happened by then.

There is not long to wait before he hears the slap of sandals again and two perfecti approach. He lodges his dagger in his sleeve and then slides in behind them. One turns and nods a greeting. He nods back. The first man opens the door and waits politely for Raimon to enter. To his consternation, Raimon finds himself not in a room but facing blank wood only two steps away. The perfectus slips past him and slides another door that has been cut into the paneling.

The Flame is being kept in a small room-within-a-room, and its box has been set to one side so that it burns naked as a lonely swimmer in its small sea of oil. It looks so vulnerable that Raimon wants to rush to it, cover it up, and protect it. But he just bows like the other perfecti, and bows again at the perfectus who has been keeping it company through the night. This perfectus is motioned away but takes no notice, so the four of them sit for twenty interminable minutes before the two who came in with Raimon rise and whisper to their colleague. When they glance over at Raimon, he sinks deeper into his hood, as if lost in prayer. They whisper some more, but not, he senses, with any suspicions about himself. It is domestic matters they discuss. Then they leave and he cannot believe his luck. Only one perfectus between him and the Flame.

He shuffles on his knees across the floor. There is little distance to cover, and the remaining perfectus is bowed so low he has heard nothing. Raimon does not pause. With tight economy, he draws his dagger with one hand and slams the other over the perfectus's mouth before the man even has time to gasp. His hood flaps back, though, and in the draft the Flame flares just enough to illuminate a set of thin-skinned, corpselike features with which Raimon is horribly familiar. “Oh God!
Adela!” The cry breaks from his lips before he can stifle it, and though he does not drop the dagger, his wrist refuses to tighten for the thrust.

The girl struggles in silence, her teeth showing green between Raimon's fingers and what hair she has left hanging lifeless from her head. There is no flesh on her bones. He could break her in half. Except he cannot.

“Aren't you going to kill me, Raimon?” Her breath comes at him in small moldy puffs. “If you don't kill me right now, it'll be too late. The White Wolf is always here directly after breakfast. That's why I wait here. I like to pray beside him.” She chatters and chatters, louder and louder, as excited as a child on the threshold of a party. Without killing her he cannot silence her. He cannot kill her. He just can't. As perfecti begin to pour in, Raimon lets go of his sister and turns to the Flame. “Help me,” he cries silently. But it is crouched over the wick, almost folded into itself. If it summoned him, it has now forgotten him. “Seize him!” Adela cries. “He's trying to steal the flame!” A black tide rushes at him, and when Adela raises her arms in a victory salute, he shudders. It is no use pretending that he is not afraid.

The White Wolf's studied mildness is thinner in the keep's council chamber than it is when he is outside, and the unnatural light dulls his swansdown hair to gunmetal gray. Close to, his certitude carries a pitiless rather than a charismatic edge. He greets Raimon, when he is pushed before him, with cold courtesy. Yet despite the White Wolf's pleasure at being proved right about Raimon's treachery, Raimon does not have his full attention. Perfecti are scuttling in and out like cockroaches, whispering into his ear. Something else is happening, and Raimon
quickly guesses what it must be. During the night, the French army must have arrived at the bottom of the pog. Montségur woke to find the oriflamme casting its shadow upward. The last stand is beginning.

In the fuss, an order is issued, and Raimon finds himself hustled out of the chamber, first down the steps and then up again. Perhaps he is to be pitched from the top of the keep. It is a long way to fall.

To his surprise, however, he finds himself back in the room-within-a-room. Something has changed, though. The Flame's shadow is lined and squared. A solid iron grille, its open squares too small for a man to push through an arm, has been dropped over the salver. The White Wolf is taking no chances. The Flame has been completely secured. It will be the Flame of the Cathars or it will be nothing. Tightly bound, Raimon is shackled in a corner as the perfecti leave him, the last closing the door and securing the lock.

Near the Flame yet unable to rescue it, surrounded by enemies but unable to fight, his imagination running hot with terrible visions of the fates of Metta and her father if the White Wolf decides they deceived him, Raimon finds that quite contrary to anything he previously believed, only now does he know the true meaning of torture.

I forget the date, but I can be quite exact about the month Hugh arrives at Montségur. It is in the middle of May, and he fully expects to leave within weeks, with the Flame safely delivered to the king and the defiant Cathars either in chains or reduced to ashes. To be fair to Hugh, the ashes would not be his choice, but the inquisitors who joined his forces about ten miles from Montségur are implacable. When they take the fortress, those Cathars who refuse to recant and turn Catholic, together with those who are suspected of recanting only through fear of the pyre, will burn without trial because that is the will of the king, the will of the Pope in Rome, and, most importantly, the will of God.

And there must be no mistakes. Though it is never quite said, Hugh understands perfectly clearly that if anything goes wrong the blame will rest with him. He does not question this. As the holder of the king's oriflamme, he commands the highest respect, and for a man commanding the highest respect, the only way to go is down.

Yet the inquisitors find him rather distracted. Indeed, occasionally during the journey he has hardly seemed to be
listening to them at all. They wonder if he is preoccupied by the possible consequences of failure.

They could not be more wrong. Hugh is a soldier on campaign and, as such, cannot help thinking first and foremost of his knights, his strategy, and his goals. However, alongside the permanent nag that is the lot of a commander, the memory of his night with Yolanda plays over and over in his mind. He can still smell her skin, taste her hair, hear her voice, and he can still feel the fury of her hurt and humiliation. All these things he can bear. Though he would have preferred her consent, she is his wife. What he cannot bear is not knowing whether his brutal gamble has borne fruit or whether he has sacrificed any small affection she had for him for nothing. This preys on him. He wonders whether to send back to Castelneuf for news but then wonders whether, unbearable as it is, not knowing is in fact better than disappointment. He lives in limbo.

And soon, as if to taunt him further, he finds that just as he could not force Yolanda to love him, so he cannot force Montségur to capitulate. The place is not the least as he expected. He knew, from scouts, that the fortress was on a mountaintop, and from his visits to Castelneuf how steep the approach to such mountaintops in this region could be. What he has not expected is the sheer bloody-mindedness of this particular mountain, not just the scale and unassailability of its crags and overhangs, but also the impossibility of sealing off the thickly forested, ever-expanding necklace of ridges and gullies that spreads as deeply and widely around it as the sea around an island. Those whose advice is to “storm the fortress” have clearly no notion that this would be possible only up the southwesterly face on the path taken by Sir Roger, and that since this path can accommodate
fewer than five men abreast, and unmounted men at that, such an operation would simply be providing target practice for those manning the slings in the huts outside. Nevertheless, Hugh does send fifty men up, and goes up himself at their head. Nobody should accuse him of not making an attempt. Fewer than twenty return.

Yet the mountain is not impregnable, as the occasional echoing shouts of welcome from the fortress walls reveal. Every day, local Occitanians reach the top and are welcomed inside. They, of course, do not go up by the main path. Slowly and reluctantly, over many years and through many generations, the mountain has been forced to yield up the unfathomable intricacies of its jagged, many-layered skirts to those living beneath its shadow. To the people of Montségur, therefore, the pog has become a kind of monstrous friend, and now it proves its worth. It is not impossible for a local Occitanian to find a way to the top, it is just impossible for a foreigner.

So, unable either to storm the mountain or, with his current number of soldiers, to cut off its supplies, since even to form the thinnest circle around the pog's full spread would involve virtually every knight not just in France but in Christendom, Hugh has no option but to send for reinforcements and, as he waits for them to arrive, to settle in for the most unsatisfactory and permeable of sieges, deploying his men as best he can. His knights mutter and complain. They should go home, they say. It is pointless hanging around when they can do so little. It makes them look foolish.

But Hugh stamps on such talk. The French king wants the Blue Flame, and the inquisitors want the Cathars. Both are on the top of the pog, which, however unlikely it seems at the
moment, will sooner or later have to surrender, if not for lack of food, which their friends may carry up those hidden paths, then for lack of water, which they probably cannot, at least not in sufficient quantities. Over the summer, the fortress will surely weaken. Meanwhile, they will continue to launch occasional assaults and block all the major roads out of the valley. Scouts and spies will try and map the mountain as best they can, and all villagers caught selling the Cathars food or suspected of transporting it up to the fortress will be punished severely. Bribes will be offered to local guides. This, for the moment, is the best they can do.

I shall not bore you with details. Any siege is a tedious affair. There is no glamour, only a daily grind. There is no victory, except of having gotten through another day. Routines very soon become established. Every morning at the bottom of the pog, the oriflamme is hoisted on a specially lengthened golden lance from which, when the wind is up, it flaps its red tails like bloodied fingers. Every evening, from the top, the White Wolf holds the Blue Flame aloft in reply.

This reassures Hugh. So long as he can see the Flame, he has not failed, and he also begins to understand that the White Wolf, who could clearly escape with the Flame should he so desire, has no intention of doing so. Both sides understand that this will be a fight to the death.

Moreover, though the siege hardly threatens the lives of those camped high above, just the presence of the French army is certainly inconvenient. The very sight of the tents puts off at least a few potential Cathar recruits, and to reinforce the notion of French power, at random intervals Hugh rolls the siege engines as far up the path as he can and batters
the pog. Though the catapulted stones tumble uselessly back, they make an alarming noise and a good deal of dust. Above all, it gives the soldiers something to do.

So much for the bottom of the pog. At the top, there is much unhappiness for Sir Roger after news of Raimon's attempt to steal the Flame is broadcast. Metta does not rant and rage, she grows ever more silent because even she, with her desire to see the best in things, cannot pretend she has not been used. That Raimon has been unsuccessful somehow rubs salt in the wound. However, she cannot help begging the White Wolf not to hurt him and is reassured when she is told that he is simply being kept near the Flame so that he can be reminded every day of his great betrayal. The White Wolf smiles secretly at Metta's obvious relief. How little this girl understands. Raimon's suffering could not be more acute were he to be flogged every hour. He has failed, and conspicuously so, as the Flame constantly reminds him. What is more, the White Wolf will not allow him to discard the Cathar habit. Raimon will wear it and, eventually, be paraded in it. An exquisite punishment, and entirely within the Cathar precepts, for no blood will be shed, at least not by the White Wolf. He can leave that to the inquisitors.

He reveals none of this to Metta, of course, just asks if there is anything he can do for her, and when she requests to have her father's ring returned, returns it himself. She breaks down as he hands it over, and when he gathers her to him, she barely resists. “Let God take your pain,” he says pointedly. “
He
will not let you down.”

Aimery, while telling everybody who will listen that he never trusted Raimon, privately scolds Laila. “Had you let me be,” he tells her, “I would have gone into the keep with Raimon,
and the Flame might be mine.” He has never bothered to pretend to her that his Cathar conversion is real. She responds by arching her back and when he asks, to tease, if she is sorry now that she believed Raimon to have thrown Yolanda over, since this is clearly not the case, she just shrugs. This makes Aimery smile. Though their backgrounds could hardly be more different, how similar they are! Laila's motto in life, so it seems to him, exactly mirrors his own: look after yourself and let all others go hang. Watching her sleep, curled up in his shadow, he feels quite tender toward this unexpected soul mate.